All the anticipation for one of the most exciting comic events in the history of The Flash and it was just one episode of television. Barry went back in time yet again and let the Reverse-Flash kills his mother, again, in hopes he could undo the damage he’d done by creating the Flashpoint timeline. This all happened in about 15 minutes, after most of the episode was spent watching Barry be enamored with the prospect of living the life he always dreamed of. But there was a reason Flashpoint wasn’t treated as a multi-episode event, and Executive Producer Todd Helbing recently took some time to explain.
“I think anytime you do a story like Flashpoint, something as iconic as that, with the character restrictions that we had, it's going to be different than everybody expected," Helbing said to ComicBook.com. "I think for us from a story point, when we talked about it originally it was going to be more episodes but what happens more often than not is that when you break the story you find that it would be a lot better and a lot more satisfying if you pulled up a lot of that information and put it in that first episode...”
As we’ve seen in the first three episodes, the consequences of Barry’s time-traveling field trip are serious. Caitlin Snow is turning into Killer Frost, Cisco’s brother is dead, Iris and Joe don’t talk, and Diggle has a baby boy instead of a girl. Even more, the season’s big bad is a direct result of Flashpoint. Dr. Alchemy is recruiting every person who was a metahuman in Flashpoint timeline for his own mysterious agenda. Edward Clariss and Magenta were Alchemy’s first victims. Mirror Master may be his third, and Wally could even be it risk down the line.
“It just became a much stronger episode if we just made it one as opposed to four or five, and then we could really kickstart the rest of the season after that. But Flashpoint or not, there are consequences going forward for Barry for what he did and those ripples he's going to explore throughout the third season,” Helbing said.
So while it may have been disappointing Flashpoint wasn’t as big an event as everyone expected it to be, the characters and stories developing as a direct consequence will have a huge impact moving forward.
The Flash airs Tuesdays at 8 p.m. on The CW.
